Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.

An armed guard stands at the entrance of the Survival Condo Project, a former missile silo north of Wichita, Kansas, that has been converted into luxury apartments for people worried about the crackup of civilization.Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”

“I released a lot of emotion with my drumming, but I still need to have a tantrum.”

For some, it’s just “brogrammer” entertainment, a kind of real-world sci-fi, with gear; for others, like Huffman, it’s been a concern for years. “Ever since I saw the movie ‘Deep Impact,’ ” he said. The film, released in 1998, depicts a comet striking the Atlantic, and a race to escape the tsunami. “Everybody’s trying to get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed.”

Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”

Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”

In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks. Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”

How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?

Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures, Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, a San Francisco-based venture-capital firm, told me. “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios. Tim Chang, the venture capitalist who keeps his bags packed, told me, “My current state of mind is oscillating between optimism and sheer terror.”

In recent years, survivalism has been edging deeper into mainstream culture. In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history. A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k). Online, the prepper discussions run from folksy (“A Mom’s Guide to Preparing for Civil Unrest”) to grim (“How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive”).

My mom’s parents would be referred to as preppers if they were living in today’s world, but back in the day, they lived like many country people did. Great Depression life wasn’t easy, but their daily choices afforded them more abundance than many, especially once rationing set in during the second World War. Mom used to tell me stories about growing up on their small diversified farm, and I always admired the ingenuity and determination of the two of them. Grandma and grandpa passed on when I was still very little, so I didn’t get a chance to know them well, but I will always remember these lessons, and pass them along to my children – and you.

Grandma and Grandpa Were Preppers – 5 Lessons from Great Depression Life

#1 – Raise Your Own Food and Store for Lean Times

Grandma raised large flocks of laying hens, which she replaced annually as production dropped off. Some birds were canned, some were sold to neighbors as stewing birds. She had a big kerosene incubator, and used that in combination with broody hens to hatch the different types of poultry. Grandpa raised geese, cows and pigs, and had horses for farm work and other heavy jobs.

They had a large garden, with a sizable area just for breadseed poppies. Grandma was Czech, and you had to have poppyseed for kolache and other baked goods. Although grandma and grandpa passed when I was just a toddler, I still remember grandma’s yellow raspberries, and grandpa with the geese. Grandma had bees, which they used for beeswax and honey, which was a real blessing during WWII when sugar was rationed. Momma once showed me the ration coupons she’d saved from when she was a little girl.

They butchered and canned their own meat, and rendered their own lard for cooking. Each summer and fall the cellar was stocked well with home canned goods.

When money was tight and food was rationed, the family was always well provided for off of their own land.

#2 – Live Within Your Means

It may not be polite to talk about such things, but mom’s parents acquired their main homestead because others defaulted on their loan and taxes and lost the property, and grandpa had the money to pay off the debt and take over. When they first moved to the site, they lived in an old granary that was overrun by mice and rats. It was pretty nasty to live in at first, but grandma made do and got the place clean enough to live in while grandpa built the house.

Mom said went she went to school, she could always tell the poor girls from the more well off girls, because the poor girls (like her) wore flour sack dresses. Her mom would take her to the general store and let her pick out the print she wanted for her dresses. Nothing was wasted.

#3 – Learn Skills That Allow You to Tackle Jobs Yourself Instead of Hiring Everything Out

Grandpa used a large scoop pulled by horses to excavate the foundation for the home he built for them by hand with the help of their hired hand, who mom referred to as “Injun Joe”. He and Joe built their dairy barn and other outbuildings, too.

Mom told me a funny story about the barn. When they moved to the site, there was an old barn in rough shape that needed to be replaced. Grandpa took out a lot of the fasteners, hoping that a good wind storm would finish the job, but the barn kept standing. Finally, he gave in and tore the barn down by hand and built a new one. Not long after the new barn was up, a tornado came through – and landed right on the barn. Grandpa had to rebuild again. Not “funny” funny, but what are the odds?

They had an ice house for keeping things cool, so each winter they gathered ice off of a local lake. There was no electricity in the house until grandpa rigged up a windmill with a battery bank. Mom said she and her brothers would get in trouble for flipping the light switch off and on just to marvel at how it worked.

#4 – Work Together with Neighbors

The neighbors got together to work on projects, like stripping feathers for fluffy down feather ticks (mom used to call them “pierzynas”) and for quilting bees and ice hauling. Many hands still make for lighter work, especially with very time consuming and tedious projects.

Card parties and dance socials were still regular gatherings where you could talk and catch up on local events. People knew and cared about their neighbors.

On a smaller scale, grandma enjoyed fresh tomatoes, which of course don’t grow very well here in Wisconsin for many months of the year. To support her tomato habit, grandma kept a plant growing inside in a south window all through the winter, hand pollinating the blossoms so she could have fresh tomatoes.

Preparing for Tough Economic Times

Things have changed lot since those days, but I think grandma and grandpa would appreciate our garden, root cellar and canning pantry. She’d probably be wondering where my animals are, but I didn’t marry a farmer so for now I’m thankful I have close friends and neighbors who love critters. (Don’t worry, grandma, we’re planning on getting chickens this year!)

It’s important to preserve the old skills while making room for the new. Figure out what works for you – where you are, with what you have. Don’t be afraid to try new things and tackle big projects – just create a support system that helps you complete them.

Do you have any family stories from the Depression Era that you’d like to share? I’d love to read them.

It’s that time of year again; time to over eat and over drink, and wonder where on Earth 2016 went? So I write out small lists each year at this time and hope to focus on them. For literally nearly twenty years I wrote “get a degree” before getting one so it works but you still have to act on it. At my age time (52 or 364 in dog years) speeds up and the SHTF becomes harder and harder to physically deal with and life is busy so who has time for SHTF? Anyway the Government will save me or I will die in the nuclear fire-ball so why bother? Still, assuming you, like me, find these common arguments against prepping to be illogical then maybe you can add some good prepping resolutions for me in the comments?

Resolution One – Make sure I prioritize skills over toys

My Meetup Group is a decent source of fun, free, and often prepping activities. Lots of hikes to do and who knows I am loading the ruck with weight as bug out or bug back practice?

This one is hard for me as I work too much (two full-time jobs) but bills need paying, career needs growing, and I do not have much time. I have health care covered but everything else is weak. Some really are weak. What to do? I have bought a planner for 2017. I am going to find things to do and go and do them. My Meetup Group is a decent source of fun, free, and often prepping activities. Lots of hikes to do and who knows I am loading the ruck with weight as bug out or bug back practice? Good to use the legs and shoes and clothes outdoors. Not much foraging until later on in the year but I plan to take full advantage of these hikes and free skills meet ups. Groupon often has decent cheap day events in martial arts, archery, and even survival. I have used both these sites before and really need to do this more often. There are many great people in my area offering great skills. Even actual prepping groups offer free meetups to learn and try skills. The Ontario Preppers Network is a solid and well led organization in my area yet I am always working weekends so never have attended. That has to change I think!

Resolution Two – Organize My Preps

I do go through my bug out and get home bags frequently but in all honestly most of my none food preps are shoved in a cupboard. In the Summer I laid everything out in the basement and saw huge gaps I was utterly unaware of. I bundle the extra hard gear and tools into a tote box and buried that at my cottage on the next trip. That reduced my prepping supplies nicely and has given me a lot of useful things in the ground at the cottage. If the forest burns down I will still have those tools and gear and frankly they were just lying in a cupboard so win, win.

Having gear stored in one location is nice, but not always possible.

Still I do not use excel sheets or compulsively label and organize so this area will be a challenge. I need a bunch of decent tote boxes and to devote a day to sorting and storing the remaining gear. As I said I am not a list person so a permanent marker will be used to write the contents on the lids. This should work.

My hope is to go to the cottage next winter and leave the power off and even snow camp next to it to really try out the gear.

I will soon have a three-layered ground system for myself and my girlfriend to sleep on (thank you Pat and the Prepper Journal readers for my recent prize) and the sleeping bags, liners, and wool blankets seem decent. My hope is to go to the cottage next winter and leave the power off and even snow camp next to it to really try out the gear. Minimally I intend at least one overnight in February by myself to try this system out.

Resolution Four – Food Prepping beyond One Year’s Supply

Some things people find easy and for me food prepping is the one area I am good at. I label, bag, and store great foods, in good variety, and can eat them all and create okay meals. As a new prepper in 2015 I realized the few tins of baked beans I stored under the stairs in the UK in 1980 for the nuclear war with Russia would no longer given me much psychological comfort. I read and thought and saw that the 72 hours (one to two weeks) the Canadian Government recommends would be of little use in a major regional or national SHTF. By adding to the groceries and using cardboard boxes we soon got to six months and I am happy to say now have a further six months in buckets with small Mylar bags inside them.

What I want is a ten year supply for two people.

Still this is not the supply I actually want. What I want is a ten-year supply for two people. For me trying to survive a nuclear war and resultant nuclear winter is worth the attempt. That should cover most SHTF scenarios. So I am at 10% of my goal here and I am not leaping into prepackaged survival foods to finish it. As a vegan for the last six years (I knew you’d ask lol) I understand the importance of variety and minimal processing. This will be worked on in six months amounts. 12 five gallon buckets are about six months’ supply for the two of us. By year’s end I’d like at least at three-year supply but I’d like five years’ worth.

Sprouting will continue but I am finding after five years the mason jars and lid grills are looking a bit done in. It will be time to add to that supply in the spring when I order sprouting seeds which are mainly stored. I order twice a year. Sure many seeds will dead in SHTF but even a few viable ones can be sprouted, eaten, and even planted. As I add to the store every year I am content to have some expire but will keep them and see if I can grow something in SHTF.

Seed saving started in 2016 and we are going to continue that in 2017. Black walnut processing also started in 2016 but the squirrels got every one of them as they dried out. I now have net bags to suspend from the ceiling and anti-squirrel coverings!

Resolution Five – Get More Personal Security

For me this means personal strength and endurance needs to get back to near the levels they were in 2007. Then I had been a sub three hour marathoner for years and had raced over one hundred ultra-marathons even wining a few smaller ones. Since then I have gone to seed and added about 60lbs (I am a fat vegan 5’10” and 228lbs). 2017 is the time to fix that as I think I am over my burn out. Start small and keep going. My body needs to be sharper than my mind and I do not think starting an exercise regime in SHTF is smart.

For me this means personal strength and endurance needs to get back to near the levels they were in 2007.

Complete building my long bow kit and practice it. Consider a machined bow as well. Get more arrows and heads and learn more about archery in general.

Go and buy wood boards and cut them to size to cover the insides and outsides of the down stairs windows. Label, store, and have them ready to nail up in SHTF. Overall I consider this to be a major concern and one that I have simply been ignoring.

Keep talking to and enjoying my neighbors as they might well be a very valuable resource for me in many scenarios.

Resolution Six – Fun stuff

You have to have fun, right? We are focusing our summer on making sure we can both attend the Annual Preppers Meet as I attended on my own last year and found it a lot of fun and met a lot of interesting people. If things work out we can go dog free to the cottage for a week and kayak and camp around Haliburton as I have always wanted to trip along Canoe Lake. Take the BioLite on the next unpressured dog walk into the forests around us and brew some tea. Get the girlfriend to build and light a few fires as she is fire phobic. Stay open; keep reading the Prepper Journal; and watching YouTube when on night shifts. Use my hands rather than my mind at every opportunity and generally focus on my weaknesses more than playing to my strengths.

Bug-Out Security with U.V.

I was talking to a fellow on the phone the other day about bug-out bags. He indicated that he had read somewhere lately that he should mark his map with three routes to his BOL (Bug-Out Location) and asked what I thought of the idea.

I indicated that, at least in my opinion, that it didn’t sound like a sensible OPSEC (Operational Security) idea. In a bug-out situation there are many conditions that could cause your map to fall into the wrong hands.

It could be lost or even taken by force, to name a few. In the wrong hands, you’ve just revealed where you are going and that place most likely has your supply of food, weapons, ammo and other self-reliance items. Other members of your family might even already be there.

My thoughts were that it’s not a bad idea to have alternate routes to you BOL, predetermined in the event of detours. But you don’t want to advertise them. I believe in running your routes, before you need to use them and memorize those routes. In executive protection, the advance team and drivers always run various routes such as the hospital, airport, etc., so they are familiar with possible detours and become comfortable with the routes. The same should occur with Bug-Out routes. But in the event a family involved and something did happen to the main leader, a map could come in handy. So, upon further thought on the matter, I felt if you really wanted to mark a map, then you should do it covertly.

What I came up with was the use of a fine-point UV (Ultraviolet) marker to make your markings, then use an UV light to see the markings. I happened to have used this technique for other purposes over the years so I knew it would work in this situation. I also have a couple of different small UV lights that could easily be carried or concealed in a pack.

This photo shows a map of an area where a BOL could be. This map already has three routes marked to a location using a UV marker.

This photo shows the marked route using the Micron Freedom with UV LED.

As you can see, this is a great way to make markings without other people being able to see them. This can be used for other OPSEC purposes as well. Let’s say you have some information that you want to carry with you, but don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. This could be phone numbers, lock combinations, or other personal information. You could write that information in an innocuous location on something that you have on you such as a piece of paper in your wallet. What I like to do is write inside a small book, in a location that I won’t forget. You could use odd pages, or always start on page 12, etc. Use a system you’ll remember.

This is a page from the Emergency Pocket Survival Guide which is very small and thin booklet. It could be carried in almost any survival kit or pack.

This photo shows how information could be concealed on a page of an innocuous book.

This could also work for information kept at your home or BOL. Just use any book sitting on your bookshelf and add the information you don’t want people to see with a UV marker.

Anyway, I thought this information might be interesting to people who want to mark their maps with various routes to their BOL without it falling into the wrong hands, or securing other private information. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.